I went to the institute for creation research website (icr.org) to see if they still have a radio program and apparently they’re now heavily attacking evolution and repeating a lot of the same old myths and misconceptions (and apparently they no longer allow people to call in, which explains how they‘re able to do so). They have a link to a website with a series of slick, polished, professionally made ads promoting various claims about the bible, creationism and evolution called “That’s a fact”. The videos ironically contain many false claims. I thought I’d elaborate on a few.

This one seems to be just meant to inspire fear of god, it explains that we can’t outrun natural disasters because tsunamis travel at 600 miles per hour. In reality what travels that fast is only the pressure wave under a thousand feet or so of water, mostly due to the relatively incompressible nature of water which translates the energy of earthquake vibrations under the ocean extremely efficiently, especially at great depths where the water is under high pressure. When that pressure wave reaches shallow water and forms the actual wave (tsunami) it slows down to the speed of a leisurely drive to work. For instance here is a video of someone surfing a tsunami wave – according to this creationist video the surfer should be traveling roughly the speed of a slow moving bullet. Is he, or is the “institute for creation research” really bad at research? You decide.

This one claims that the fact that soup gets cold and cars break down disproves evolution somehow, and the video vaguely alludes that this has something to do with the second law of thermodynamics. The video avoids the flaws with this long debunked claim that the second law contradicts evolution by simply not stating what the second law is or how it contradicts evolution and just implying everything vaguely. It says instead that the second law is “what scientists use to describe” things that break down and that the second law makes “some scientists” doubt that evolution can improve anything. What the second law actually is is the observation that in an isolated system all things tend to break down into simpler forms. An isolated system is a system with no energy being fed into it, which in other words means that you need energy in order to build complexity. In biological terms a baby needs food in order to grow, and without food (energy) it will not gain complexity overall. If the creationist interpretation of the second law (that building up complexity violates the laws of physics) were accurate and true it would make not just evolution impossible but all life and complexity. Building a car in the first place would be impossible.

The video then claims that entropy and decay make perfect sense from a christian point of view because of the fall of eve (and has a picture of an apple rotting). This is stupid because an apple doesn’t rot because of entropy, it rots because it’s being actively eaten by bacteria which are using it’s energy to build up complexity. And the bacteria that decompose a dead person’s body also actively digest our food. Entropy, bacteria etc isn’t a drain on the universe, it’s part of what makes t he universe work the way it does.

This one is just silly. It attempts to rationalize the existence of specialized teeth in carnivores by simply ignoring them and pretending everything is a herbivore or an omnivore. I learned in like 4th grade (in a catholic school) that omnivores (that eat both meat and vegetables) have teeth for both cutting/tearing and grinding, like your front (cutting) and back (grinding) teeth. Whereas a herbivore has only grinding teeth:

(cow’s teeth)

and this fella:

Ain’t eating a lot of veggies.

But according to the video, animals like crocodiles use their sharp teeth to open walnuts and coconuts, lol. I’m not kidding, they actually say this.

The video also suggests that the fact that eating too much meat is bad for you supports the bible because god’s “original plan” was not to eat meat and that god only gave us “permission” to eat meat after the flood. Setting aside the theological implications of a perfect god who has to go with plan B, and the total absence of any kind of evidence that this historically took place and the fact that I don’t think the bible even says this, setting all of that aside, eating too much meat is bad for you but eating too much of anything is bad for you. The reason we generally can’t eat “too much” of most vegetables (the ones that aren’t toxic that is) is simply because they’re almost entirely made up of water. If a steak was 80% water we could fill up on steak every day and not get fat too. Also the fact that we cook meat which breaks down the nutrients into fats, which is good if you’re living in a hut somewhere and might starve, but bad if you sit around eating all day.

“So again, is the institute for creation “research” doing it’s research? Or are they just acting like they have in the hopes that you won’t?”

This one claims that the genesis flood story was passed on by many cultures. It leads with the legend of the native american Hualapai tribe which according to the video has an account of a global flood that includes “an old man similar to noah, as well as a dove”.

I looked up their flood story, tell me if you think they’re telling the same story:

“The Hualapais say that it was one of theircultural heroes, Pack-i-tha-a-wi, who made the Grand Canyon. There had been abig flood, and the earth was covered with water. No one could stir butPack-i-tha-a-wi, and he went forth carrying a big knife he had prepared offlint, and a large, heavy, wooden club. He struck the knife deep into thewater-covered ground and then smote it deeper and deeper with his club. Hemoved it back and forth as he struck it further into the earth, until thecanyon was formed through which all the water rushed out into the Sea ofthe Sunset. Then, as the sun shone, the ground became hard and solid, as we find it to-day.“

The video goes on to say that many other cultures have stories involving a flood, and most of them say that some people survived in boats, and this proves the global flood really happened. Ignoring that floods are common and early people who didn’t have water pumped to their houses had to live on or near flood planes so their villages were routinely washed out to sea so it makes sense many cultures would have stories involving floods the same way every culture has stories about sex, death and other universal things – ignoring that, OF COURSE these myths will all say that some people survived, and OF COURSE these myths will often mention boats as a means of survival, that’s the only way the myth works. You can’t sit around the campfire telling how every last person drowned to death once without somebody saying “I call bullshit, how are we alive? And if everybody died how do you know it happened?” Then the next time they tell the story they say some people survived and passed on the legend.

The video then claims that because some parts of the world were once under water this proves there was a global flood – the reality is that none of the geological evidence is consistent with that, we find whale fossils in the desert and fish fossils on mountain tops which proves they were once under water, but we don’t find these things on the same layers which would have to be the case if they were all under water at the same time. The reality is that mountains and continents are pushed out of the ocean by tectonic activity and we can measure the rates at which mountains, continents and islands are growing out of or shrinking into the ocean (don’t worry, they’re very slow).

So again, is ICR doing their research, or trying to prevent you from doing yours?

This one is particularly sleazy. It says that while bacteria evolve and gain new traits like the ability to resist antibiotics and other drugs, they aren’t really “evolving” because scientific studies have proven that they’re still bacteria, and the text description says they haven’t evolved because they’re not a new “species” of bacteria. The sleazy part is two-fold – one they pretend this is something that scientists have proven through experimentation as though this were something worth actually testing (when it’s really scientifically incoherent) and that science is somehow on their side, and two, they pretend it matters at all. Bacteria isn’t a species, it’s one of the three categories all living things on the planet fit into.

This is the family tree of all life – there are all different kinds of bacteria just like there are all different kind of eukaryotes (multi-cellular organisms). The claim that scientists bred thousands of generations of e-coli and found that they were “still e-coli” is bullshit, not only was that not what they were testing for, but there is no absolute definition of species and the concept of species doesn’t even apply to bacteria which reproduce asexually and have no definable lineage. Two dogs are a part of the same species because they can breed with each other sexually, bacteria don’t have sex, they swap DNA randomly in patterns that cannot be traced. As somebody once described it it’s like if you went swimming in a pool and drank some water and now you’ve got eyes that are a different color. “Bacteria” is the broadest grouping of single-celled life and any group that evolves from bacteria is still considered bacteria no matter how much it changes because the term defines it’s lineage as much as it’s nature, the same way that if you’re born with six fingers on one hand you’re still considered biologically human because you are descended from humans. This is just pseudoscientific bullshit.

I saved the worst for last. This one starts out talking about plastic surgery for no reason and segues into the age of the earth and says that “scientists” tell us we will grow old some day but that “some believe” the earth “formed spontaneously and quite accidentally from the big bang”. First of all the planet did not form from the big bang any more than the twin towers were knocked down by the oklahoma city bombing. They’re two events which, while they coincide in the same universe are more or less unrelated. And yes the formation of the round earth from molten rock was spontaneous and “accidental” the same way any liquid forms a ball “spontaneously and accidentally” in zero gravity. If you want to know how the mountains and rivers and so on formed it’s more complicated but I guarantee you it is the result of spontaneous, blind forces.

Then they say the crap about carbon-14 in diamonds. The carbon-14 isn’t in the diamond, it’s in trace amounts in all air on the planet and the test to see what is in a diamond requires burning a diamond (which requires oxygen) and so the trace materials in the oxygen you use to combust the sample shown up in the test results. It’s contamination of the sample made necessary by the way the test is done. Honest technicians and scientists acknowledge it for what it is, dishonest creationists present it as something else.

Then they repeat the claim about dinosaur blood cells and “squishy” tissue which has shown to be fossilized and contain no DNA (the earliest fossilized cells date back to 3.4 billion years ago, fossilized cells is nothing new) and the elastic feel of the “tissue” has been attributed to fossil contamination from younger fossilized slime.

They then say that spiral galaxies and “blue stars” can only be seen if those formations are young – no rhyme or reason or logic is given to support this random statement. The actual facts are that “blue stars” are very large and therefore yes have to be relatively young, though by “young” they have to be in the order of millions of years old, rather than stars like ours which are billions of years old. This is irrelevant however because we witness star formation in telescopes all the time, so this argument is like saying kittens only live a few years so this kitten proves the universe is only a few years old:

The kitten is praying you don’t fall for that bad logic.

As for spiral galaxies having to be “young” to be observed and this proving the universe is young, I honestly haven’t the faintest idea what they’re talking about. The nearest spiral galaxy to ours is the andromeda galaxy and it’s 2.5 million light-years away, which means we’re seeing it as it existed 2.5 million years ago (since that’s how long it takes the light to get here). And how a galaxy could even form in a few thousand years is beyond me since just one complete “swirl” of our milky way galaxy takes around 250 million years. Think about it, for the earth to go around the sun once takes 12 months, for the solar system to go around the entire galaxy takes much, much longer. If you were traveling from one end of the galaxy to another at the speed of light (the fastest it is possible to travel) it would take you about a hundred thousand years to get to the other side. So the idea of galaxies just swooshing together quickly is just stupid.

I might do more later if I feel like it. Rec if you think the institute for creation “research” is full of shit. Or if you liked the science content. Or if you’re just nice : )

13 Responses to “That’s A Fact” (Not Really) – Creationist Website.

What I don’t understand about you hardcore prosylitizing evolutionists is why you feel so threatened by groups like this. They are privately funded, which means that if you don’t like what they have to say you don’t have to give them any of your money, whereas your stuff is all publicly funded and we all have to pay into it. I get the impression that you aren’t very confident in your own beliefs.I’m not going to get into all sorts of details here but I am just going to make a few points.1. You know full well that no one has ever seen a star form, and that there is no natural mechanism in place to allow for that.2. You know full well that having sharp teeth does not mean one has to be carniverous. There are lots of Obama voters who are vegens, and I doubt your dog gets a lot of meat in his diet. Most people own dogs, who have teeth that are good for ripping and tearing, but they spend all their lives eating nasty dry processed pellets.Of course not all of us can survive on vegetarian diets. I think I would die without meat, but the thing is, in Genesis God told them that the plants would be as meat for them, which to me indicates that there might have been some plants that were high protien and fibrous like meat, and may have even had a salty flavor (but of course that is just speculation).

@Ambrosius_Augustus_Rex – “What I don’t understand about you hardcore prosylitizing evolutionists is why you feel so threatened by groups like this. They are privately funded, which means that if you don’t like what they have to say you don’t have to give them any of your money, whereas your stuff is all publicly funded and we all have to pay into it. I get the impression that you aren’t very confident in your own beliefs.”My views are not threatened by groups like this, I just don’t like dishonesty and I think promoting inaccurate information is generally harmful and destructive. If you tell a lie and I expose that lie does that mean that your actions threaten my view that lying is bad? I get that people lash out sometimes out of fear but that isn’t what I’m doing. I don’t have existential crises the way theists do. I no more am worried that there might be a god than I am that the earth might not be round – because if either were true I’d want to know, and not believing those things isn’t what I think gets me through my day.”I’m not going to get into all sorts of details here but I am just going to make a few points. 1. You know full well that no one has ever seen a star form,” Well that depends what you mean by that. We’ve detected the radiation signature of stars forming in other galaxies and observed stellar nurseries dense with new stars and we’ve studied young stars, old stars, and dead stars of all varieties.”and that there is no natural mechanism in place to allow for that.”Ever hear of gravity?”2. You know full well that having sharp teeth does not mean one has to be carniverous. There are lots of Obama voters who are vegens, and I doubt your dog gets a lot of meat in his diet. Most people own dogs, who have teeth that are good for ripping and tearing, but they spend all their lives eating nasty dry processed pellets.”Those dry, processed pellets contain protien from meat, and both humans and dogs are domesticated animals that eat processed foods, I’m talking about species’ natural diets. Either way some nutrients like b-12 only occur in animal products, which is why strict vegans have to take supplements.”Of course not all of us can survive on vegetarian diets. I think I would die without meat, but the thing is, in Genesis God told them that the plants would be as meat for them, which to me indicates that there might have been some plants that were high protien and fibrous like meat, and may have even had a salty flavor (but of course that is just speculation).”Interesting concept, but yes, speculation. I think it meant like meat as in food. Early humans began cooking meat because it doubles the calories and cuts the number of calories your body has to use to digest the meat in half, which again is harmful today because food is so abundant, but was very useful for fighting off starvation in early nomadic communities.

The above comment is pretty mindless and not worth talking about, but is only an example of how blind and illogical some groups of people are. I’m certainly not the brightest bulb in the package, but I will never understand how creationists make sense of any of that. It’s simply believing what you want to believe and damn the evidence to the contrary.

Outrunning disaster. http://vimeopro.com/icr/thats-a-fact/video/38528910 This one seems to be just meant to inspire fear of god, it explains that we can’t outrun natural disasters because tsunamis travel at 600 miles per hour.Actually, 600 mph is greater that what NOAA quote in one video and the same in another (400-500 mph and 600 mph http://www.tsunamiready.noaa.gov/media/Tsunami_know_what_to_do_Rev2.swf), but I don’t see any problem with the ICR video on that count. They didn’t in the ICR video refer to speed of the waves crashing onto shore. The second law.I don’t fully understand the second law. However, I don’t see any problem with noting that your points seem strongly to debunk the video point that sin is causing entropy but we’d better eat our soup if we prefer it hot is okay by me. I don’t doubt that “original sin” caused a separation from a universe that was free of sin–therefore, it is impossible to say if the second law is a result of that separation (for me).Sharp Teeth.This video promotes eating fruits and vegetables. I don’t think that the video promotes views that disagree with evolution. I don’t think that this video in any way demonstrate a prejudicial view against any group. The references to what God says is perhaps unnecessary regarding diet, but I don’t see what harm it inflicts against science. The video is not exemplary toward living a Christian life. Other than promoting a diet that is rich in fruits and vegetables, I don’t notice any lasting value to this video. Flood Stories.I don’t know how accurate the science (a body of evidence) may be. I’ve read these theories before. Some fossil finds and rock formations, etc,. do appear in places that indicate something is out of place. I don’t know if this supports a flood theory. My belief is that the first five books of the Bible are accepted as accurate all religions that use these books. I do not care to debate that any of the stories support that evolution is or is not occurring. Examples such as yours “but we don’t find these things on the same layers which would have to be the case if they were all under water at the same time.” are helpful in that as a non-scientist, I know, I’m not investing myself any more than for an hour to consider all the facts regarding Noah’s flood. That is all the time I had for today. I learned a few thing that I didn’t know. Thanks for your work. Also, the investigation that I did do demonstrated to me what I believed before I began. No one seems to know how to accurately describe what is the origin of life. Christians follow with Bible stories and scientists look for evidence via scientific method. It is all good with me. I’ll tell you this, more clearly than before. I don’t care what theory is correct. Furthermore, I (personally) believe that scientific investigation of God’s divine revelation to the true prophets is useless. I (personally) believe that creationists are wasting lots of time and money to create disputes where most Christians would not care to be involved. Humility is a good point to ponder. If I got anything that is of great value today by taking time to read and reply it is that humility is a valuable trait. Perhaps I’ll look at the rest of the points in the future. I am past out of time for today… but, THANKS again. I do appreciate your work Mark. Sincerely,Hunt

@whyzat – And yet here you are talking about it. So what does that make you? There are a good deal more just so stories in your belief system than ours. Saying that we disbelieve evolution because we don’t want to believe it is ridiculous. Maybe the real reason why you don’t believe that the Ganges was created by Vishnu wringing out his hair is because you don’t want to.

@agnophilo – Sorry for the delayed response. “Theists” have an existential crisis? A theist with an extential crisis is really an agnostic.I don’t know you personally, but from the debates we have had I noticed that you have used bait and switch tactics on occasion. That being said, you do realize that there is a difference between belief and lying yes? For example, I believe that evolution is incorrect, however, if you really and truly believe evolution is true then you aren’t lying if you say that we are all descended from bacteria. You’re mistaken, but not lying, because in order to lie someone must deliberately dissimenate information which they know to be false.Second, I’m not a consistent reader here, but I have yet to see you go after Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Satanism, Taoism, Jainism, scientology, etc. I also have yet to see you go after parents for telling their kids about things like Santa and the tooth fairy. Those last ones are actual deliberate lies. I get the impression that you feel threatened by Christianity on some level given the ammount of attention you give it.You are not simply an apologeticist for evolutionism, otherwise you would not be concerned with websites like that. Anyways I agree that promoting inaccurate information is harmful and destructive, no matter what it is being used for, but I wonder if you would ever apply the same level of scrutiny to your own community.But back to the points:1.You know there are assumptions that go into determining what is an old star or a new star, and that observable charastics of stars are evaluated based upon those assumptions. I agree that more stars are being discovered, which is bound to happen as technology improves and light from more distant stars reaches the Earth. That doesn’t mean that the star has just come into existence, it could mean that the light just reached earth, the technology has improved, or some other object that was in the way may have cleared up, such as a gas cloud.I have indeed heard of gravity. As you know gravity is generated by mass, which is why stars have gravity but how are you going to have gravity before there is a star?2. That depends on the pellets you get for your dog. My point is, that if it happens now then it could have happened in the past. There are two things we both agree on. One is that in the past the world was tropical and densely foliated. Another is that the coal and oil are a byproduct of that foliage. Where we differ is that you think it took millions of years, whereas I believe it happened right away during the flood as massive amounts of vegitation were buried under sediment. The point is, there would have been more eating options in the past than we have today.

@whyzat – Are you referring to ambrosius’ comment?@we_deny_everything – Yup, I’ve seen it. Though it tapered off in quality toward the end, and thunderf00t really blew the debate with ray comfort.@eshunt@revelife – “but I don’t see any problem with the ICR video on that count. They didn’t in the ICR video refer to speed of the waves crashing onto shore. “The waves crashing on the shore is the actual tsunami. And the video is claiming we can’t outrun a tsunami because it goes at six hundred mph. Are you saying the video is arguing that we should be worried about “outrunning” a shockwave a thousand feet under the ocean?”I don’t fully understand the second law. However, I don’t see any problem with noting that your points seem strongly to debunk the video point that sin is causing entropy but we’d better eat our soup if we prefer it hot is okay by me. I don’t doubt that “original sin” caused a separation from a universe that was free of sin–therefore, it is impossible to say if the second law is a result of that separation (for me).”There is no indication that the fundamental properties of physics have changed over the last several billion years, if they changed six thousand years ago then stars closer than 6,000 light years away would emit different forms of radiation than stars further away, because the light takes that long to get here which allows us to literally look backwards in time and verify that the properties of the universe haven’t changed. Even if I were christian I would take genesis as an allegory or as a myth.”This video promotes eating fruits and vegetables. I don’t think that the video promotes views that disagree with evolution. I don’t think that this video in any way demonstrate a prejudicial view against any group. The references to what God says is perhaps unnecessary regarding diet, but I don’t see what harm it inflicts against science. The video is not exemplary toward living a Christian life. Other than promoting a diet that is rich in fruits and vegetables, I don’t notice any lasting value to this video.”The video is just spin, it’s claiming that science supports young earth creationism by twisting studies on the effects of eating too much red meat as being consistent with “the fall”. It also says many ridiculous things.“I don’t know how accurate the science (a body of evidence) may be. I’ve read these theories before. Some fossil finds and rock formations, etc,. do appear in places that indicate something is out of place. I don’t know if this supports a flood theory.” There were civilizations around when the flood supposedly took place that didn’t get wiped out. The native americans were in north america at least ten thousand years for instance, they would’ve been wiped out by the flood. Plus freshwater fish would’ve died when ocean water mixed with fresh water etc. Taking the flood story literally doesn’t make sense.”My belief is that the first five books of the Bible are accepted as accurate all religions that use these books.” Define “accurate”. Can a poem be “accurate”? It’s interpretive, subjective, has many possible meanings. If you mean literally, historically correct, many stories in genesis are anything but accurate.”I do not care to debate that any of the stories support that evolution is or is not occurring. Examples such as yours “but we don’t find these things on the same layers which would have to be the case if they were all under water at the same time.” are helpful in that as a non-scientist, I know, I’m not investing myself any more than for an hour to consider all the facts regarding Noah’s flood.”Yeah the geological column is not consistent around the world, it shows signs of great age and lots of change. The layers contain the history of meteor impacts, volcanic activity, floods, forests that have come and gone, ice ages, rivers forming then drying up etc. And of course erosion – layers form then a few erode away, then new ones form on top – which is why there are gaps in the geological column in all but a few places in the world. None of which is consistent with one big catastrophic flood.Plus if the geological column formed from mud being stirred up and settling from the flood, 1) the dirt” going miles under ground would already have been compressed to stone under it’s own weight and wouldn’t magically turn into mud when it started raining, and 2) as the water levels rose the water itself would absorb in the impact of the rain and the ground would no more be stirred up for miles under ground than the ocean floor is stirred up for miles underground when it rains.”That is all the time I had for today. I learned a few thing that I didn’t know. Thanks for your work.” You’re very welcome.”Also, the investigation that I did do demonstrated to me what I believed before I began. No one seems to know how to accurately describe what is the origin of life. Christians follow with Bible stories and scientists look for evidence via scientific method. It is all good with me. I’ll tell you this, more clearly than before. I don’t care what theory is correct. Furthermore, I (personally) believe that scientific investigation of God’s divine revelation to the true prophets is useless. I (personally) believe that creationists are wasting lots of time and money to create disputes where most Christians would not care to be involved. “No one knows what the first life was like for the same reason no one knows the first word spoken in the first language – it simply wasn’t recorded. The first word in the first language would have come before written text, and the first cell would not have had components hard enough to fossilize.”Humility is a good point to ponder. If I got anything that is of great value today by taking time to read and reply it is that humility is a valuable trait.”Glad I could help : )”Perhaps I’ll look at the rest of the points in the future. I am past out of time for today… but, THANKS again. I do appreciate your work Mark. Sincerely,Hunt” Nice of you to say. Thanks for coming by.

@Ambrosius_Augustus_Rex – “Sorry for the delayed response.”Likewise.”Theists” have an existential crisis? A theist with an extential crisis is really an agnostic.”Anyone who thinks is agnostic, theist or not. Agnosticism is about whether the belief in god is knowable (demonstrable), not about belief. “I don’t know you personally, but from the debates we have had I noticed that you have used bait and switch tactics on occasion. That being said, you do realize that there is a difference between belief and lying yes? For example, I believe that evolution is incorrect, however, if you really and truly believe evolution is true then you aren’t lying if you say that we are all descended from bacteria.” Ironically I would be lying if I said that because it’s not true and I know it’s not true. See the “tree of life” picture in the blog.”You’re mistaken, but not lying, because in order to lie someone must deliberately dissimenate information which they know to be false.”I do appreciate the distinction, and I agree that most believers are not being deliberately dishonest when they repeat this crap, but I think the people who make it are being deliberately dishonest. I don’t believe that someone could go to the effort to make a video like that (and call themselves a research institute) without coming across information that contradicted their bullshit. Saying that carnivores don’t exist because “hey look, here’s an omnivore, forget about carnivores!” is dishonest. And claiming that alligators use their teeth to open coconuts? As abraham lincoln put it, “It is an established maxim and moral that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false is guilty of falsehood, and the accidental truth of the assertion does not justify or excuse him.””Second, I’m not a consistent reader here, but I have yet to see you go after Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Satanism, Taoism, Jainism, scientology, etc.” I actually just posted two videos satirical of islam the other day, and as for why I don’t criticize other beliefs I don’t agree with, see here. When people start wars in the name of taoism and use satanism to take peoples’ rights away and so on, I’ll blog about it. In my part of the world non-christian religious people tend to mind their own business. If 90% of the population were atheists and they were trampling the rights of religious minorities I’d be railing against them instead.”I also have yet to see you go after parents for telling their kids about things like Santa and the tooth fairy. Those last ones are actual deliberate lies.” I agree, though aside from bumming the kid out when they find out the truth I don’t see the great harm done by those lies. If kids were severely bullying each other on the playground over belief in santa clause etc, you don’t think I’d condemn teaching it to children?”I get the impression that you feel threatened by Christianity on some level given the amount of attention you give it.”It’s fair to say I feel threatened by christianity, but not in an existential way, not in terms of my worldview. In terms of being actually harmed by christians in tangible ways. I live in a so-called democracy where I can’t run for public office because the number of christians who refuse to vote for non-christians make up the majority of the voters. I live in a country where around seven states explicitly bar non-believers from public office in their state constitutions. And I’m not gay but I throw myself in with gay people and empathize with their plight and so it harms me just as it would harm me to see someone get stabbed. Even though I’m not injured I would still feel it. You might not believe me, but I put no effort into being an atheist, nor do I want to be or want not to be a theist (assuming theism is correct). I just seek the truth. I am hostile to organized religion because of the harm I perceive it causing, not because I’m an atheist. I could be a deist, I’d still disagree with organized religion.”You are not simply an apologeticist for evolutionism, otherwise you would not be concerned with websites like that.”There’s no such thing as “evolutionism”, and I’m kind of apologetic about science in general because I think nature is beautiful. But also because I think ignorance is harmful. I’d much rather someone be curious than dogmatic.”Anyways I agree that promoting inaccurate information is harmful and destructive, no matter what it is being used for, but I wonder if you would ever apply the same level of scrutiny to your own community.”How so?”You know there are assumptions that go into determining what is an old star or a new star, and that observable charastics of stars are evaluated based upon those assumptions.”I’m not an astrophysicist so I can’t give you a better explanation, but science is based on predictions and testing them against future observations, which I imagine has been done in the field of studying the life cycles of stars like in every other area of science. But I don’t know enough about that particular area of study to give examples. To be fair the notion of old and new stars could be pseudoscience but I seriously doubt it.”I agree that more stars are being discovered, which is bound to happen as technology improves and light from more distant stars reaches the Earth. That doesn’t mean that the star has just come into existence, it could mean that the light just reached earth, the technology has improved, or some other object that was in the way may have cleared up, such as a gas cloud.”No I meant that when a star forms it gives off a unique radiation signature, not that we see a star appear in the night sky. Stars form in dense clouds that block visible radiation, the radiation we detect them by passes through normal matter. It’s also worth mentioning that we can calculate mathematically what size a star would have to be to ignite (and measure the size of un-ignited massive objects like gas giants) and quantify how much energy stars give off and therefore calculate how much mass they lose per day, year, century etc, and thereby estimate how long it would take a star to get to a state where it’s gravity would be weak enough for it to explode. In the same sense that if we looked at a candle and measured how fast it was burning we could measure how long it would take to burn out.”I have indeed heard of gravity. As you know gravity is generated by mass, which is why stars have gravity but how are you going to have gravity before there is a star?”All matter has mass and gravitational attraction, it’s just very weak and gets exponentially weaker the further away you go (like the force of a magnet which rapidly gets stronger the closer the magnet gets to metal). If you took two playing dice and put them a centimeter away in space in about half an hour they would be touching. Not a strong attraction. But if you put a million of them in space, they’d form a ball that would have significantly more pull (which is why meteors have a fair amount of gravitational pull) and would draw in more matter, which would, as it collected more matter gain mass and gravity and as it did so it would become more and more dense, which would mean the atoms would be even closer together which would increase their overall attraction (because gravity is stronger the closer two objects get). This is why the same amount of mass that makes up a star or a planet (or even smaller objects) could, if compressed enough, form a black hole. So in short a big ball of dust gradually grows bigger and compresses under it’s own weight until the force at it’s core generates enough heat and pressure for the atoms to begin to cause nuclear reactions (ie atom bomb explosions) and the star ignites, bottling up that explosive power with gravity, blasting away the dust and debris revolving around it into the outer solar system where it forms into planets, gas giants etc.”2. That depends on the pellets you get for your dog.” I don’t think dogs can survive on a purely vegetarian diet.”My point is, that if it happens now then it could have happened in the past.” Not in the same way of course.”There are two things we both agree on. One is that in the past the world was tropical and densely foliated. Another is that the coal and oil are a byproduct of that foliage. Where we differ is that you think it took millions of years, whereas I believe it happened right away during the flood as massive amounts of vegitation were buried under sediment.” Actually the coal and oil isn’t dead leaves or dinosaurs, more like plankton from the ocean. Probably every part of the planet was under water at some point – there’s a big strip in the middle of the US that was once a huge lake formed during the last ice age, that’s why entire states like illinois are extremely flat and very fertile, they used to be lake beds. That stored chemical energy that we harvest in crops from those states would, under different geological conditions, be buried and turned into an oil field or coal beds.”The point is, there would have been more eating options in the past than we have today.”That’s conceivable. But as you said it’s speculation. Nothing to hang your hat on.

Moi is puzzled by the ‘Outrunning disaster’ / surfing a tsunami vid. The uploader at the Youtube site makes no pretense of it being a ‘creationist vid‘; to judge by the content of the vid & the consensus of the comments, said uploader royally misconstrues what comprises a tsunami wave.http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=AlPqL7IUT6MNeither did I find it at the ICR website; although I will confess to doing only the most cursory of searches; I typed ‘tsunami wave in the search box & scrolled hurriedly through the 14 odd articles the search yielded.Is someone intended this to be either a ‘creationist vid’ or a facsimile of one, it’s weak sauce. If moi misunderstands, would sincerely not mind a bit being set straight.

@wrybreadspread – Chew your food before you swallow, lol. 1) I didn’t say it was on ICR, I said they have a link to another website with these videos, 2) I posted the link to each video (click the title of each), and 3) the surfing video I posted as a counter-example, not the original creationist video.

Oh, and as for tsunamis, the term appears to be somewhat general but you’re right that wave might not fit the description. However there are many videos of earthquake tsunami waves and they’re clearly not moving at 700 mph so the point still stands.